Fanny.
Clarges Street, Wednesday, June 23rd, 1841.
My dearest Harriet,
RACHEL. You asked me some time ago some questions about Rachel, which I never answered, in the first place because I had not seen her then, and since I have seen her I have had other things I wanted to say. Everybody here is now raving about her. I have only seen her once on the stage, and heard her declaim at Stafford House, the morning of the concert for the Poles. Her appearance is very striking: she is of a very good height; too thin for beauty, but not for dignity or grace; her want of chest and breadth indeed almost suggest a tendency to pulmonary disease, coupled with her pallor and her youth (she is only just twenty). Her voice is the most remarkable of her natural qualifications for her vocation, being the deepest and most sonorous voice I ever heard from a woman's lips: it wants brilliancy, variety, and tenderness; but it is like a fine, deep-toned bell, and expresses admirably the passions in the delineation of which she excels—scorn, hatred, revenge, vitriolic irony, concentrated rage, seething jealousy, and a fierce love which seems in its excess allied to all the evil which sometimes springs from that bittersweet root. [I shall never forget the first time I ever heard Mademoiselle Rachel speak. I was acting my old part of Julia, in "The Hunchback," at Lady Ellesmere's, where the play was got up for an audience of her friends, and for her especial gratification. The room was darkened, with the exception of our stage, and I had no means of discriminating anybody among my audience, which was, as became an assembly of such distinguished persons, decorously quiet and undemonstrative. But in one of the scenes, where the foolish heroine, in the midst of her vulgar triumph at the Earl of Rochdale's proposal, is suddenly overcome by the remorseful recollection of her love for Clifford, and almost lets the earl's letter fall from her trembling hands, I heard a voice out of the darkness, and it appeared to me almost close to my feet, exclaiming, in a tone the vibrating depth of which I shall never forget, "Ah, bien, bien, très bien!">[ Mademoiselle Rachel's face is very expressive and dramatically fine, though not absolutely beautiful. It is a long oval, with a head of classical and very graceful contour; the forehead rather narrow and not very high; the eyes small, dark, deep-set, and terribly powerful; the brow straight, noble, and fine in form, though not very flexible.
RACHEL'S CHARACTER. I was immensely struck and carried away with her performance of "Hermione," though I am not sure that some of the parts did not seem to me finer than the whole, as a whole conception. That in which she is unrivalled by any actor or actress I ever saw is the expression of a certain combined and concentrated hatred and scorn. Her reply to Andromaque's appeal to her, in that play, was one of the most perfect things I have ever seen on the stage: the cold, cruel, acrid enjoyment of her rival's humiliation,—the quiet, bitter, unmerciful exercise of the power of torture, was certainly, in its keen incisiveness, quite incomparable. It is singular that so young a woman should so especially excel in delineations and expressions of this order of emotion, while in the utterance of tenderness, whether in love or sorrow, she appears comparatively less successful; I am not, however, perhaps competent to pronounce upon this point, for Hermione and Emilie, in Corneille's "Cinna," are not characters abounding in tenderness. Lady M—— saw her the other day in "Marie Stuart," and cried her eyes almost out, so she must have some pathetic power. —— was so enchanted with her, both on and off the stage, that he took me to call upon her, on her arrival in London, and I was very much pleased with the quiet grace and dignity, the excellent bon ton of her manners and deportment. The other morning too, at Stafford House, I was extremely overcome at my sister's first public exhibition in England, and was endeavoring, while I screened myself behind a pillar, to hide my emotion and talk with some composure to Rachel; she saw, however, how it was with me, and with great kindness allowed me to go into a room that had been appropriated to her use between her declamations, and was very amiable and courteous to me.
She is completely the rage in London now; all the fine ladies and gentlemen crazy after her, the Queen throwing her roses on the stage out of her own bouquet, and viscountesses and marchionesses driving her about, à l'envie l'une de l'autre, to show her all the lions of the town. She is miserably supported on the stage, poor thing, the corps dramatique engaged to act with her being not only bad, but some of them (the principal hero, principally) irresistibly ludicrous.
By-the-by, I was assured, by a man who went to see the "Marie Stuart," that this worthy, who enacted the part of Leicester, carried his public familiarity with Queen Elizabeth to such lengths as to nudge her with his elbow on some particular occasion. Don't you think that was nice?
Mrs. Grote and I have had sundry small encounters, and I think I perceive that, had I leisure to cultivate her acquaintance more thoroughly, I should like her very much. The other evening, at her own house, she nearly killed me with laughing, by assuring me that she had always had a perfect passion for dancing, and that she had entirely missed her vocation, which ought to have been that of an opera-dancer; (now, Harriet, she looks like nothing but Trelawney in petticoats.) I suppose this is the secret of her great delight in Ellsler.
I find, in an old letter of yours that I was reading over this morning, this short question: "Does imagination make a fair balance, in heightening our pains and our pleasures?" That would depend, I suppose, upon whether we had as many pleasures as pains (real ones, I mean) to be colored by it; but as the mere possession of an imaginative temperament is in itself a more fertile source of unreal pains than pleasures, the answer may be short too; an imaginative mind has almost always a tendency to be a melancholy one. Shakespeare is the glorious exception to this, but then he is an exception to everything. I must bid you good-bye now....
God bless you, dear.